Natasha Lomas
Natasha is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining September 2012, based out of London. She arrives after a stint reviewing smartphones for CNET UK and, prior to that, more than five years covering business technology for silicon.com (now folded into TechRepublic.com). At silicon she focused on mobile and wireless, telecoms and networking, and IT skills issues, and has also freelanced for organisations including the Guardian and the BBC. Natasha studied English at Cambridge University, and also holds an MA from Goldsmiths College, University of London.
CrunchBase profile →Featured Picks from Natasha Lomas
Latest from Natasha Lomas
-
With $50M Boost, Silent Circle Aims Blackphone At Enterprise Security
Encrypted comms company Silent Circle, one half of the SGP Technologies joint venture behind the pro-privacy Android smartphone Blackphone, has just announced it’s reached an agreement to buy out its hardware partner, Spanish smartphone maker Geeksphone. Read More
-
Google Merges European Operations To Square Up To Regulators And Rivals
United we stand, divided we fall. So goes the old saying that search and mobile giant Google is now taking to heart in Europe, as it faces off with regulators and rivals in the region. The company is merging its European regional and product operations into a single unit, to be led by Matt Brittin, formerly the head of Google’s operations in northern and western Europe, who now… Read More
-
Kaspersky Labs Launches Online Bootcamp To Eye Security Startups
More signs that security is rising up the investment agenda: another security-focused accelerator program has launched, hoping to put a clutch of security startups through their paces — this one with backing from veteran security firm Kaspersky Labs, via its educational arm Kaspersky Academy. Read More
-
Pan-European Rail Travel Startup Loco2 Adds Italy’s Trenitalia
No one is going to take an Uber from London to Naples. And, fortunately, they don’t have to. U.K.-based pan-European train travel startup Loco2 has integrated its sixth European rail booking system, signing up the Italian national rail operator Trenitalia. Read More
-
Facebook’s Data Protection Practices Under Fresh Fire In Europe
Facebook is facing fresh criticism in Europe over data protection and the myriad smoke-and-mirrors methods it uses to obfuscate its gathering and processing of user data. A report commissioned by Belgium’s data protection authority has found Facebook’s revised privacy policy, last updated in January, violates European consumer protection law in a number of ways. Read More
-
Beam Is An App-Controlled Pico-Projector To Liven Up Your Light Sockets
Pico projectors have found their way into smartphones before now, but mostly as an gimmicky add on. And one that’s fizzled out, rather than becoming a standard issue feature. But what about sticking an app-controlled projector into a light socket instead? Read More
-
Apple Expands Editorial Focus With Music Hires
Apple is sharpening its focus on editorial content by looking to hire people with a background in music and pop culture commentary. Read More
-
Social Location App FacesIn Pivots To Future Whereabouts
Social location app FacesIn has relaunched with a new focus on delivering location-based alerts about where someone will be soon — not just where they are right now. Read More
-
Reach Combines Anonymous Chat With Keyword Self-Tagging For Context
Make way for another hyper local anonymous chat app. Reach, which has just launched on iOS, has been built by an Israeli-based startup, using $250,000 in pre-seed money from friends and family to cover their development costs. The team is looking to raise a seed round as it seeks to gain traction with its spin on anon. Read More
-
Geeksphone Is Getting Into Wearables — With A Sex Tracker
Spanish smartphone maker Geeksphone, perhaps best know for its partnership with Silent Circle over the pro-privacy Android fork Blackphone, is expanding from handsets into fitness wearable Read More
-
YC-Backed Transitmix Cuts The Paper Out Of Bus Route Planning
YC-backed Transitmix, which is in the middle of the three-month accelerator program, is building a business out of helping city planners make smarter choices when configuring bus routes. The fix? An online mapping tool to speed up the process of devising and comparing bus routes. Read More
-
Upgrades Fueling Second Hand Smartphone Sales Boom, Says Gartner
What proportion of smartphone owners upgrade just to get their hands on the latest, shiny new hardware? According to a new survey of U.S. and Germany consumers, conducted by analyst Gartner, the figure is 60 per cent. Read More
-
Raspberry Pi Sales Pass 5 Million
A round of applause for the U.K.-made Raspberry Pi microcomputer — which has just passed the 5 million sales mark, some three years after it was first launched with the over-modest goal of selling “a few thousand” Pi over its entire lifetime, as creator Eben Upton has said. How wrong can you be, and how good must that feel? Read More
-
Sony Puts Its Smart Specs Up For Dev Pre-Order, For $840
Sony has put a developer edition of its forthcoming smart glasses, branded as SmartEyeglass, up for pre-order today, starting with the U.K. and Germany. It’s also made the SDK available. Read More
-
Privately Takes An Ephemeral Sharing Pitch To Telcos
A Swiss spin-out startup from security firm Kudelski has relaunched its controlled social photo-sharing app, rebranding it as Privately. The earlier timebombing iOS app — called Secret.li — also let users share visually encrypted photos on mainstream social networks in an ephemeral way, choosing to have the photos disappear after a pre-set interval. Read More
-
Find Out If U.K. Spied On You Illegally Via NSA’s Prism, Upstream
Following a landmark legal ruling earlier this month that, prior to December 2014, the U.K.’s spy agency GCHQ acted illegally by receiving data from the NSA’s surveillance dragnets, privacy advocacy organization Privacy International has set up an online form where people can submit a request to be informed whether they were spied on in the past. Read More
-
Drones To Get A Stadium Gig This Fall
From military deployment as remote surveillance and killing machines, to hobbyist toys, future delivery bots and now, coming later this year, stadium rockers… Drones have quite the application trajectory. Read More
-
Listen Carefully
There are lessons to be drawn from how people are talking about the technology services they are interacting with. Not just in general terms — whether they like or dislike a service and so on; but what more subtle linguistic signifiers might be expressing on their behalf. What reactions might be evident in language choice before those feelings are being consciously articulated as… Read More
-
Scarab Wearable Wants To Do Hyper Local Environment Sensing
Scarab is a wearable device in the works whose makers are aiming to build a comprehensive environment monitoring device which contains 16 sensors to gather all sorts of environmental data-points such as UV exposure, noise levels and other pollutants. Read More
-
U.K. Moves Closer To Liberating Its White Spaces Spectrum
The U.K. telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has officially green-lit the launch of white spaces spectrum, and suggests commercial deployments making use of the freed up frequencies could go live by the end of the year. Read More
